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Stephen Colvin

Reader in Classics and Historical Linguistics

Term time office hours: Term 2: Monday 4.00-5.00 & Wednesday 4.00-5.00         (Gordon House G-06)

Email: s.colvin@ucl.ac.uk

Research interests: Greek language, dialect and literature; Mycenaean Greek; historical linguistics and sociolinguistics 

IRIS research profile

After a degree in Classics (Oxford 1988) I did an MPhil. in General Linguistics and Comparative Philology (including a course in Hittite at SOAS in 1989), then concentrated on Greek dialect and sociolinguistics for my PhD ( Oxford 1993). I spent two years at UCL as a postdoctoral research fellow, and then eight years at Yale teaching in the Department of Classics. I returned to UCL in 2004.

I am interested in the language of Greek literature as a sociolinguistic phenomenon; in the Greek dialects and the emergence of the koine; and in Mycenaean Greek. I have also worked on bilingualism and the development of the Greek language in Lycia.

I have taken courses in Turkish, partly to acquire some perspective on Indo-European, and partly because it is such a wonderful language.

Larger Publications:

• A Historical Greek Reader: Mycenaean to the Koiné (Oxford 2007)
• The Greco-Roman East (YCS 31: Cambridge 2004)
• Dialect in Aristophanes: the Politics of Language in Ancient Greek Literature (Oxford 1999)
• A Brief History of the Greek Language (Wiley-Blackwell: forthcoming 2013)

Articles and Chapters:

• 'Perceptions synchroniques des dialectes et de la koinè', in S. Minon (ed.), Diffusion de l'attique et expansion des koinai dans le Péloponnèse et en Grèce centrale (Geneva: Droz): forthcoming 2013.
• ‘Dialect speech in Ancient Greek literature’, in A. Bartonek and Ch. Tzitzilis (eds.), Ancient Greek Dialects (Institute of Modern Greek Studies, Thessaloniki: forthcoming)
• ‘The Social Dialects of Ancient Greece’, in A. Bartonek and Ch. Tzitzilis (eds.), Ancient Greek Dialects (Institute of Modern Greek Studies, Thessaloniki: forthcoming)
• ‘The Koine. A New Language for a New World’, in Andrew Erskine et al. (eds.), Creating a Hellenistic World (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales: 2011)
• ‘Koine’, in R. Bagnall et al. (eds.), Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Ancient History (2011)
• ‘The instantaneous aorist: the syntax of the agora and the syntax of Parnassus’, in F. Cortés Gabaudan & J. Méndez Dosuna (eds.), Dic Mihi, Musa, Virum: homenaje al profesor Antonio López Eire (Salamanca 2010), 113-21
• ‘Greek Dialects in the Archaic and Classical Ages’, in E. Bakker (ed.), A Companion to the Ancient Greek Language (Blackwell: 2010), 200-212
• ‘The Greek koine and the logic of a standard language’, in M. Silk and A. Georgakopoulou (eds.) Standard Languages and Language Standards: Greek, Past and Present (Ashgate 2009), 33-45
• ‘P. Artemidorus: Text, Proem, Koiné’, in A. Soldati et al. (eds.), Cultura ellenistica, lingua e filosofia nel Papiro di Artemidoro: atti del colloquio del 15 novembre 2008 (LED Milano: 2009), 57-66
• ‘Autosegmental phonology and word-internal -h- in Mycenaean Greek’, Glotta 82 (2006), 36-54
• ‘Social Dialect in Attica’, in J. H. W. Penney (ed.), Indo-European Perspectives. Studies in Honour of Anna Morpurgo Davies (Oxford 2004), 95-108
• ‘Names in Hellenistic and Roman Lycia’, in The Greco-Roman East (YCS 31: Cambridge 2004), 44-84
• ‘The language of non-Athenians in Old Comedy’, in D. Harvey & J. Wilkins (eds.), The Rivals of Aristophanes (Duckworth/Wales 2000), 285-98
• ‘The Atticist-Asianist Controversy’, in New Oxford Encyclopedia of Rhetoric (Oxford 2001)
• ‘Aristophanes: Dialect and Textual Criticism’, Mnemosyne 48 (1995), 34-47